Our new column,Staff Picks, takes you back to a time when video stores reigned supreme andthe "Staff Picks" section was the placetofind outwhat films were worthy of one's time.Of course, our version of Staff Picks has a decidedly skintillating angle, as we suss out the films from a particular subgenre are the best to find great nudity. This week, we look at one of the shakiest subgenres of them all, the sketch comedy movie!
Like anyone who watches Saturday Night Live can tell you, sketch comedy is difficult to sustain for ninety minutes. For this reason, you just don't see a lot of sketch comedy movies getting made. The last major sketch comedy movie was 2013's Movie 43, an unmitigated star-studded disaster which can now enjoy its only mention in this column. Contrary to popular opinion, there are a handful of great sketch comedy movies, or at least a handful that have enough worthwhile stuff in them.
In other words, very few, if any, are better than the sum of their parts—three of the five on this list qualify—and often fall back on lazy tropes like an endless parade of commercial parodies. Many even stretch the notion of feature length—the longest on our list comes in at a cool ninety minutes flat, while the average running time for the five was eighty minutes and change. As you'll see, another uniting factor among the best sketch comedy movies is nudity. The more copious and gratuitous, the better.
The Groove Tube (1974)
A full year before he became the breakout star of SNL, Chevy Chase made his feature film debut in this 75 minute progenitor to the much better sketch comedy films that followed. That reliance on commercial parodies I mentioned earlier absolutely plagues this flick, with a commercial running after seemingly every sketch. After an opening parody of the first 20 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, we get a sketch following the exploits of a hitchhiker—played by 70s music quasi-icon Buzzy Linhart—bringing the film's first nude scene from Richmond Baier! She picks up Linhart and talks him into having sex with her in the woods. She strips off her clothes and begins running, with him in nude pursuit...
Fourteen minutes later, we get our third commercial parody for a product called "Geritan," spoofing the then-current advertising campaign for Geritol. Chase talks about the product's benefits while his randy wife, played by adult star Jennifer Welles, strips off her clothes all around him...
The film's final nude scene comes to us from Rebecca Brooke(aka adult film star Mary Mendum) who bares it all while having hardcore sex—the penetration is blurred out—while a pair of rambunctious sportscasters provide colorful commentary...
For a taste of the film's comedy, there's this classic Chevy Chase musical interlude performed with the film's writer/directorKen Shapiro in the second-to-last sketch of the film...
TunnelVision (1976)
Neal Israel, the man behind such classics as Bachelor Party and Police Academy, made his directorial debut with this sketch comedy flick that's probably the most plot heavy example on our list. Chevy Chase turns up again here, along with fellow SNL-ers Laraine Newman and Al Franken, as well as John Candy in his feature film debut. The plot, set in the then-future of 1985, revolves around a crooked senator played by WKRP's Howard Hesseman attempting to co-opt the titular television channel, the most popular in the world.
To be honest, it's barely a plot, but it makes more of an attempt to tie everything together than all but one other film on our list. Dody Dorn, who would go on to become an acclaimed editor of such films as Memento, appears in a PSA just eight minutes before this 70-minute film comes to a close. She shows off everything in an attempt by the church to lure people back...
There's also a brief look at future Private Parts director Betty Thomas topless with pasties alongside co-star and future SCTV co-star Joe Flaherty...
The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)
**The following text is excerpted from our SKIN-depth Look at director John Landis' career, as I have nothing more to add some six months later, other than to say that this is probably the best pure "sketch comedy movie" ever made...
Jerry and David Zucker, along with their friend Jim Abrahams, founded the Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 70s and began honing their unique brand of humor.After seeing Landis on The Tonight Show, they contacted him to see if he might want to help them make a feature film. They secured the film's $650,000 budget by creating a ten minute short film that showcased the film's brand of humor. All of the seeds for the comedy revolution of the late 70s and early 80s were sown here, with the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team eventually earning their own equally successful brand thanks to their films likeAirplane!
Comprised of 26 short films,The Kentucky Fried Moviehits more often than it misses, and perhaps the only thing about it that doesn't work now is the sheer number of gags and character names (likeAirplane's Rex Manning) they recycled from this film into their later films. The first really hilarious moment comes 9m minutes in when they unleash the skin-flick parody trailer "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble." This Samuel L. Bronkowitz production features the immortal sight of skin legend Uschi Digard getting her huge hooters pounded against a shower door...
Then we get the topless trio ofLenka Novak,Nancy Mann, andBetsy Genson, who flaunt their fun bags in two different scenes in the trailer...
An hour and eleven minutes in, we're treated to a trailer for another Samuel L. Bronkowitz production, "Cleopatra Schwartz," whereMarilyn Joi's sexy Pam Grier-esque blaxploitation heroine marries an Orthodox Jew...
The film ends with a couple—the woman played byTara Strohmeier—who start to get busy during the nightly news broadcast. Before long, however, the anchor starts to notice the couple, calling other guys from the station (played by those pesky ZAZ boys) over to check out the hot sex happening during their broadcast, with everyone climaxing together...
Yes, the movie has its fair share of problems, namely that it's centerpiece is an overlong parody of kung-fu movies with a guy who sounds like Bruce Lee with a speech impediment. There's some classic gags in there like hearing classy voiceover announcer Shadoe Stevens say "enormous genitals" but it's overall too weak to sustain a third of the film's total run time.
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)
This would have to be the single best film on the list and while it doesn't have a plot per se, its sketches are thematically linked by a progression from birth to death, dropping in on a variety of individuals in various stages of the journey from cradle to grave. During adolescence, we drop in on a schoolteacher (John Cleese) giving his teenage students a lesson about sex that includes a demonstration thanks to the teacher's wife (Rocky Horror's Patricia Quinn) stopping by todemonstrate sex for the class! It's a hilarious scene, though maybe not the best in the film, but it's not for lack of trying on Patricia's part...
Our lack of ability to identify the women in the sketch near the end of the film where Graham Chapman is chased to his death by a group of topless women prevents us from putting it up on the site, but it'savailable on YouTube...
Amazon Women on the Moon (1987)
Our final stop on the sketch comedy movie express is probably the most recent sketch comedy movie worth bothering with in the 21st century. Instead of springing from the mind of one person or small group of people, this was a collaborative flick with five credited directors—including John Landis and Joe Dante. Sadly, none of the best sketches have much skin in them, but there are some sketches that do have great nudity!
Early in the film, skin legendMonique Gabrielleplays a model going about her normal, everyday routines fully nude...
Then we get a long break from nudity until the 71 minute mark when Marc McClure—Jimmy Olsen fromSuperman: The Movieor Dave McFly from Back to the Future, depending upon your reference point—brings home a personalized dating tape that features the sensationally stackedCorinne Wahltopless...
Finally over the end credits we get to see a short film entitled "Reckless Youth" based on the old flickReefer Madness, whereTracy Hutchinsongoes topless and the late, greatCarrie Fisherlooks super sexy in a bra...
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